Monday, October 25, 2010

Maybe Artificial Human Skin Does Exist

A little over a month ago I wrote about the difficulty of testing medical adhesives. The challenge is that human skin is difficult to mimic, not only because of it's low surface energy, but also because it is elastic - most adhesives adhere well enough to deform it and that work of deformation is always included in the measurement.

So here's to me embarrassing myself by finding a couple of papers that claim to have developed a suitable substrate for testing medical adhesives. One is in the Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology (2007, Vol. 21, No. 15, 1497-1512) and the other is in The International Journal of Pharmaceutics (2009, Vol. 368, No 1-2, 83-88).

It seems pretty simple, cook up some gelatin in water and NaOH, add some glycerol, some fatty components and then finally crosslink the whole mess with some formaldehyde. I've got to try some of this soon, as it will great to (verify and) know about before we get another medical adhesive project.

And best of all, my back will thank me. (See the earlier post if you don't get this reference.)

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